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Word for the World - August 15

2016Aug 15

COMMENTS

Moses’s Other Wife

Then Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married (for he had married a Cushite woman). (Numbers 12:1, NASB95)

This passage has caused a lot of turmoil with a lot of people needlessly. The problem is, Moses, his wife, whose name was Zipporah, was a Midianite woman, not a Cushite. Twice in verse 1, the text tells us that Moses married a Cushite woman. Some have tried to do grammatical gymnastics to make Cushite mean Midianite, or even to make it mean black or dark skinned. It’s amazing the tales one will weave and they refused to take God’s Word at its face value. Some writers have even said that Moses was divorced, based upon this passage alone. That is the epitome of reading into a text instead of reading out of the text!

If you take Scripture at its face value, and you understand the day in which Moses lived, then there is really no problem. First, Acts 7:22 says that, “Moses was educated in all the learning of the Egyptians, and he was a man of power in word and deeds.” The next verse tells us that Moses was this man of power in words and deeds before the age of 40, when “it entered his mind to visit his brethren, the sons of Israel.” This verse tells us what could be easily assumed, that Moses had a long list of accomplishments before we are introduced to him at age 40. While we assume that Moses was a 40-year-old virgin, a little bit of common sense would tell us that Moses had likely married by the age of 40. If we begin to investigate this assumption, we would find that the noted historian Josephus, along with the Christian historian Iraneus, both say that Moses conquered Ethiopia for Egypt, and that he took an Ethiopian princes as his wife as part of the conquest. And, in the days of Moses, Ethiopia was known as Cush. The bottom line is that the Bible said what it meant and meant what it said, and we can trust it!

In His Grace;

Dr. Randy White

For more solid Biblical teaching, including a daily radio broadcast
from Dr. White, please visit Randy White Ministries.